Shining Arcanine wrote:
You are looking at the chips USB Keys use and are making a bunch of generalizations.
No I'm not. As I said earlier, a large number of the customers I deal with purchase embedded systems that USE 2.5" flash drives. We actually pre-install 2.5" flash drives from M-Systems, Memtech, and others.
Shining Arcanine wrote:
1. Capacity is not a major problem when a 2.5" flash drive can contain dozens of chips.
2.5" drives have a practical height restriction. This means you can only fit a single PCB inside the metal casing. You'd have a very hard time cramming 10 or more chips (assuming standard 48-pin TSOP flash pacakges), into a height-compliant (9.5mm) drive
casing. I have never seen a height-compliant flash drive containing more than 8 flash chips.
The selection of flash drives drops off considerably once you get above 4GB. There are companies that offer 2.5" drives up to 128GB, but be prepared to pay a hefty premium (several thousand dollars). They also tend to be much taller than the standard laptop
drive.
Shining Arcanine wrote:
2. Prices for flash memory are going down. I treated myself a flash drive late last year and now I can buy the same model for half their price.
I never said that prices weren't going down (just about any piece of computer hardware gets cheaper by the day). However, traditional rotating disks are dropping in price also. For a flash-based drive to become cost-effective, it has to drop in price FASTER
than its rotating equivalent. At the current rates, the per-megabyte price gap is WIDENING. This means flash drives will always cost a premium, even several years from now. In fact, the premium will get WORSE, not better over time.
Shining Arcanine wrote:
3. When you RAID 0, say a dozen chips, throughput is not a problem and modern single chip USB Keys can get 20MB/s or over, so if the drives were only to have a few chips, throughput would not be a huge problem.
Sounds nice in theory, but you need a huge amount of parallelism to make up for the limitations of flash devices. Rotating 2.5" drives consistently come out higher on sustained transfer rate benchmarks than their flash cousins.
Shining Arcanine wrote:
4. While each bit of a flash drive can only last a 100,000 writes, with special algorithms modern flash drives move static data to heavily used areas and often changed data to lightly used areas so the write limit in practice is actually billions of writes;
at least according to Samsung anyway.
Did you not read my post? I already mentioned wear-leveling. I siad it EXTENDS the life of flash drives, but DOES NOT eliminate the problem. A typical Windows install on a flash drive (used every day) can wear it out within two years.
Shining Arcanine wrote:
At this rate we will have 64GB for $900 in 2007, 128GB for $900 in 2008, 256GB for $900 in 2009, 512GB for $900 in 2010 and so on. That should halve the prices for the 32GB model each consecutive year, meaning $450 in 2007, $225 in 2008, $112.5 in 2009 and
$56.25 in 2010.
Wow, I can pay almost $1,000 for a drive that is considerably smaller than current rotating drives. If I wait until 2010 it will be cheap. However, by 2010, it will be pitifully small (a next-gen DVD drive will have more capacity). By 2010, laptops will
probably be shipping with >500GB drives.
Don't assume that your storage requirements will remain constant for the next four years. Newer versions of software (Vista, Office 2007) will have higher disk space requirements. Also, the amount of data that you need to store will probably grow. Your music/movie
collection will get probably get larger. Games get more detailed graphics and textures.
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